Hans Bader’s wife and daughter read something ridiculous about him on the left-wing website Bluesky: He is an “incel,” claimed a self-described “Bluesky libertarian” who hates conservatives.
This was a surprise to Hans’s wife, who has been married to him for more than 20 years. The term “incel” refers to young men who are “unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one” and are “frustrated by their lack of sexual experiences.” This does not describe a middle-aged married man like Hans.
The Bluesky libertarian also claimed that Hans is “genocidal“, although Hans is a mild-mannered lawyer who has routinely condemned genocide.
Other married people also are vilified as “incels” on Bluesky. Adam Bates, a former employee of America’s largest libertarian think tank, spends his days on Bluesky vilifying libertarian writers and academics he thinks are too cozy with free-market conservatives, such as Robby Soave and David Bernstein. Bates, a self-described libertarian, labeled Soave as an “incel” even though Soave was married and well-liked, and has been employed by libertarian Reason magazine for years.
Bates claimed that Bernstein, a libertarian law professor, was an example of “genocidal lunatics” employed by libertarian “institutions” to “carry water for colonialism” and “genocide.” Bernstein is an expert on the law of evidence who teaches constitutional law at George Mason University. Bernstein dislikes woke restrictions on speech, which angers people like Bates. Bates likes woke restrictions on speech, and supported suspending a conservative academic who criticized affirmative action, because that offended some black students, who Bates viewed as the academic’s “paying customers.”
Bates’ hyperbolic attacks on Bernstein and others were not true at all. As Wikipedia explains, “Bernstein is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law, Economics and Public Policy, a Claude Lambe Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies, and a senior editor of the Yale Law Journal.” Bernstein is the author of books such as “Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations and the Supreme Court from Reconstruction to the New Deal,” published by Duke University Press.
But Bates’ nastiness only made him more popular among the other leftists on Bluesky who claim to be “libertarians.” After Bates made light of violence against U.S. Senator Rand Paul, he was defended by the Bluesky “libertarians”, one of whom called Bates a “perfectly normal libertarian.”
No one is more factional and petty than Bluesky “libertarians” like Bates. They are the pettiest of all splinter groups. Bluesky “libertarians” spend much of their energy attacking other libertarians, such as Robby Soave, Cathy Young, and Megan McArdle, that they view as being too cozy with conservatives or anti-woke centrists (even though Young and McArdle voted for the Democrats in the last three presidential elections, meaning they are not conservative).
Most Bluesky “libertarians” do not seem very libertarian, when it comes to economics. Some describe themselves as being “progressive” or having a “left lean on economics,” such as former libertarian party leader Nicholas Sarwark. He said on Bluesky that “Libertarianism came from the left and belongs on the left.” “Libertarians ought to…oppose…capitalism,” wrote Cory Massimino, a Bluesky libertarian who is extremely popular with other Bluesky libertarians. Massimino wrote a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Libertarianism, in which he argued that “Opposition to…adult supremacy, ableist supremacy, and capitalism are all social justice causes” that are essential to libertarianism, properly conceived.
In Monty Python, The People’s Front of Judea has endless petty squabbles with the Judean People’s Front, choosing to bicker with them rather than unite against the Roman occupiers. Bluesky libertarians are often just as petty. There are Bluesky “libertarians” who hate pro-free-market libertarians like John Stossel and Bryan Caplan, but they like leftists such as the socialist professor Matt McManus, who writes for Jacobin magazine. Some Bluesky libertarians say that socialism has worthwhile aspects, or that “the best kinds of socialism” are good. Many of them harbor hatred or spite for many other people who seem normal.
Bluesky libertarians sometimes hate centrists, preferring a “liberal-socialist alliance.” They are angered by centrist Democrats such as Larry Summers, Matthew Yglesias, and Josh Barro, who urge the Democrats to moderate their positions in order to win elections. They deride these sensible moderates as “heterodox centrists” or “reactionary centrists” and some want the Democrats to purge them from the Democratic Party. They call for primary challenges to moderate Democrats, such as Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the most pro-market Democrat in Congress.
Some Bluesky “libertarians” supported Biden’s Build Back Better Plan, which would have cost trillions of dollars. Some of them supported spending trillions of dollars on government stimulus plans. Many of them support spending trillions of dollars on reparations. Some of them support spending trillions of dollars on writing off student loans at taxpayer expense. Many of them support welfare, food stamps, or universal basic income programs.
The Bluesky libertarians enjoy being in the ideological sewer that is Bluesky. Bluesky is home to loathsome leftists who deny the genocides committed by Communist regimes, such as the Holodomor and mass killings in China. Bluesky users — including journalists — gloated about the murder of a CEO. “The deluge of support I am seeing over there for murdering health insurance executives is depraved and disgusting. Taylor Lorenz is already targeting other CEOs. Lunatics,” noted a prominent economist who posts on Bluesky and X.
The Bluesky libertarians prefer being there to being on X — formerly known as Twitter — even though X, unlike Bluesky, has a fairly even ideological balance between liberals and conservatives. Some of them would like to avoid centrists and conservatives by being on Bluesky.
By being obnoxious and hateful to normal people, leftists antagonized other people into voting for Trump, the very president they claim is a fascist. Even progressives themselves have begun to recognize this. “As the progressive comedian Marc Maron asked his audience in a recent special, ‘You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism, right?’” There are Bluesky libertarians who have similarly spent years antagonizing centrists and conservatives.
